Learning jQuery

If you ever need to learn jQuery then probably your best starting point is Jeffrey Way's excellent jQuery for Absolute Beginners Video Series.  It assumes that you have a reasonable grasp of HTML/XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, but then that is only to be expected because jQuery itself is a clever blend of these technologies.

I originally only started on the video series to fill in time until my copy of Learning jQuery 1.3 (Chaffer and Swedberg, Pakt Publishing, 2009) arrived.  However, even though the book was delivered yesterday, and I am only half way through the series, I have learnt so much from the videos that I am going to continue and finish them all before starting on the book.

Update on Thu 2009-10-08 by Tristram Brelstaff

I have just finished this series and here are my thoughts on it. 

I found the pacing ideal: Way doesn't try to put to much into each episode, but I still felt as if I was making significant progress. At various points I was able to stop the video and work ahead on my own, and so was able to reinforce lessons learnt in earlier episodes.

Way's programming style sometimes leaves a bit to be desired: he tends to code fast, leaving missing semicolons, unbalanced parentheses, and ragged formatting to be sorted out the debugging stage.  But this gives him a chance to demonstrate the use of the Firebug debugger.  He also seems to be trying out different editors at various stages in the series, but eventually settles down to NotePad++.

All in all, an excellent introduction to jQuery. 

Jeffrey Way has produced similar video series on PHP and on Wordpress, see here for more details.